Carbon fiber brain implant electrode has made breakthroughs in animal research

August 23, 2024

The University of Michigan has successfully developed a tiny implantable carbon fiber electrode that has demonstrated the potential to provide a long-term brain computer interface in mice, allowing for the capture of the range and subtle differences of electrical signals over a long period of time.

This research achievement may one day bring progress to humanity and improve the quality of life for many people through the following ways: enabling amputees and spinal cord injured individuals to control advanced prostheses, stimulating the sacral nerve to restore bladder control, stimulating the cervical vagus nerve to treat epilepsy, and providing deep brain stimulation as a possible treatment for Parkinson's disease.

Due to its excellent conductivity and historic application in cleanroom technology, silicon is currently the most widely used in brain implants. But the human body sees silicon as a foreign substance, which means it will lead to the long-term formation of scar tissue, and ultimately it will degrade, no longer capturing brain signals, and need to be removed.

However, carbon fiber may be the answer to obtaining high-quality signals, and its interface can be used for years rather than months. Elissa Welle pointed out that when carbon fiber electrodes are implanted, they are located inside the brain in a way that does not interfere with surrounding blood vessels, as they are smaller than those vessels and move around to adapt to such small objects, rather than being torn apart like when encountering larger implants.

The smaller size accounts for a portion of the electrode's compatibility in brain tissue, but its needle like shape can also minimize compaction of any surrounding tissue to the greatest extent possible. Larger carbon based electrodes have been proven to exist in the human body, and in fact, they promote the growth of neural tissue rather than degeneration.